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Bedlam’s Gift

Do you remember the playground, that place
of inherited rules, rough and tumbled
into kingdoms with short reign: King, Ace;
no certainty of claim – empires crumbled?
Humbled victors became losers. The once
proud owner of a patch relegated;
made to start again. A bottom-up dunce
stripped of position, mocked and berated;
slated; given no slack; given what comes;
given the licence to begin again;
to re-climb; to reclaim status. That’s bedlam’s
gift, that’s the playground I remember then…
. No need to keep the playground free of dust.
. The prissy playground is a breach of trust.

To the reader: The school yard is a swirling patchwork of colours and shapes. The blacktop accommodates the hoops and high bouncing balls; white slashes of squared concrete cater to the criss-cross of tennis balls; and the green-grassed fields squarely frame the arc of foot propelled projectiles. All of this in the context of highly competitive play; skin in the game delivers respect and reputation. In my memory, it was sometimes fun, sometimes fair… very rarely perfect.

To the poet: A jumble of words. A connected tangle of playful poetics. This sonnet works in three fields that overplay the shape of simple four-line stanzas. Each stanza ends with a rhyme that begins the next; text creating an extra ripple of repetition. Then there’s the enjambement that carelessly bounces over boundaries; a breach of rules; edgy, annoying but fair play.

Join the Journey

Author: Tim Grace

At the beginning of February 2010, I was at Brisbane Airport, in transit and on my way to Brunei. A hectic one-month work assignment was looming and I knew I would need some way of releasing my 'off task' thoughts. Fortunately, as it turns out, the airport bookshop had sold out of its copies of Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger died a few days earlier - 27/1/2010) - so, next to his empty plot was a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
The seven hour flight to Brunei was the perfect length to finish all 154 sonnets. Obviously, there are some brilliant poems in amongst his life's work; but there are the occasional verses that leave you wondering. Read in a single sitting the sonnets collectively tell of an artist who was easily smitten by love, had an obsession with his mirrored image, was haunted by his increasing age and looming mortality. He often uses the changing seasons as a metaphor for these themes which are expressed in the context of a semi-rural environment.
While on assignment in Brunei, I resided at the Abdul Ruzaq serviced apartments and to escape the need to make a new eatery decision each night I surrendered my eating habits to the Charcoal Grill. At a table for one (and set for four) I usually settled into a routine consisting of menu selection, sonnet readings, dining; and to finish - a brewed coffee as the accompaniment to my own sonnet writing.